I don’t think anyone is really aware how far the split has gone, at this point. Danny is maybe vaguely aware, but it hasn’t been come out and said–I mean, Amber’s been saying it for a while, the way she differentiates between alters, but everyone seems to take it as just differentiating roles.

Except she’s trying to make herself look as bad as possible. She literally believes she is a monster, that anyone showing her comfort or support is delusional about what a monster she is and a force that is a danger for all.

She wants someone to finally validate that besides Mike, to tell her what she’s telling herself, that she’s broken dangerous garbage who should be locked up.

It’s not what she needs. It’s not what is true. But it’s what she wants and will do her damndest to present here.

… While Dorothy has a lot of the book-smarts needed to assess things analytically (though probably not the specific training), she’s also pretty sheltered. I don’t think she’s ready for a full-on dose of OMFGWTH abuse-and-trauma reality.

The best person to have this conversation with, at least of the main cast, would probably be Billie.

No botes for Ruth? They have similar backgrounds and Ruth HAS tried to reach out to Amber twice before her own spiral. I feel a now-educated-and-medicated Ruth could really help. More than Dorothy anyway.

Not trying to armchair diagnose, but legit want to know: has Amber’s “me and her” distinction been discussed from a mental health standpoint? Does this universe’s iteration of Amber, based on her life experiences, have some sort of a dissociative identity disorder, as confirmed by Willis, or is just a convenient turn of phrase?

As far as I know, no. I can’t find it now, but I’m 99% sure David Willis wrote a text post on one of his Tumblrs semi-recently about being up in the air about actually confirming anything regarding Amber/Amazi-Girl because of potential backlash either way…? I really really wish I could find the post in question, but I couldn’t after searching for more than half an hour aaaaa. :C I really don’t want to spread something that sounds like a rumor without a clear source to point toward, but at the same time I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have hallucinated that because I’ve actually been wondering about this myself, and I remember that seeing something referencing it was super super interesting to me. So, uh, take that with as large a grain of salt as you’d like. ;~;

But either way, for people who know something about multiplicity/DID? What SarahSaur said – intentional or not, some similarities are DEFINTELY there.

I think Willis indicated that he didn’t want to officially label her as DID, just as he didn’t want to officially label Dina as Autistic, because he does not have enough personal experience to feel authoritative in providing representation of those experiences. So like, doesn’t want to label the character and then fuck up the representation.

Well, I read what Willis said as kind of indicating that he wasn’t intending Amber to be interpreted as DID, but that there was one individual in particular he frequently heard from that was persistant finding in finding value in the representation of DID in comic and to whom it was rather important. I think Cerberus indicated that the individual that Willis heard from wasn’t him. In any case Willis has followed a fine line where it could be interpreted either way and honestly, that seems to work pretty well.
Of course my memory and interpretation of what Willis said could be easily colored by my preexisting biases.

Yup, wasn’t me but yeah, I feel very much the same way that having a character I can identify with who hits home on some of my experiences as a person who has lived most of their life with DID has been powerful. Especially as it is being done by a person who cares about doing these stories right and not just going for the easy normative out on multiple stories.

It means a lot and has been critical for helping me reconnect with pride to this aspect of myself that will always be with me after hiding it for so long in fear that it would be used to deny my gender or sexuality or that it made me an inhuman monster everyone should fear.

Representation matters, and even if Willis never confirms if she has DID, he’s presenting her as a complex human being who probably has it. She’s a human first, mental condition second. That’s pretty rare for fiction.

OH GOOD I didn’t hallucinate that post. I’m legit glad people seem to know what I’m referencing. ;~;

I got some of that vibe from it too, though I don’t want to speak for someone I don’t know personally. But as an artist/writer myself, honestly, I wouldn’t blame him at all if that is true. That shit’s TERRIFYING. Making diverse characters is great and important, but the whole time there’s a raincloud of ‘AAAAA BUT WHAT IF I’M GETTING EVERYTHING WRONG???’ just waiting to pour. It happens even when I DO know about the thing in question. :C

(I say this as someone in both sides of the fence, too! I’m the minority in question regarding some of my characters, but not others.)

You’re not crazy or spreading a rumor – I found that post awhile ago. He said he didn’t want to confirm it or deny it, I think, because he wanted people to interpret the character for themselves. Or something like that. But there was at least at one point a post of his talking about it. I believe it was an answer to a tumblr ask question.

Willis has said, apart from official medical diagnoses, that he has known people who behaved in these ways (both Dina-fashion and Amber/AG-fashion), and have used them as models for Dina and Amber’s behavior.

He doesn’t, but they are both trying to help the same person and they aren’t on the kind of bad terms I would think where anyone would HAVE to say ‘I don’t owe you anything’ because that would imply Dorothy feeling entitled to something from him when she doesn’t.

It wouldn’t hurt for her to ask but I doubt she’d push him if he said ‘no, I can’t tell you anything’.

Ehhh, a willingness to obfuscate the truth for a good/moral reason is still a form of absolutionism, just different from AG’s lawful good strategy. Fortunately, it’s still a benevolent absolutionism (neutral good, since it’s mainly a balance between respecting and breaking the law, or, respectively, lawful and chaotic good?), so Dorothy shouldn’t sell herself short – she’s pretty great.

…amazigirl is not lawful good, she’s a damn vigilante. Having a moral code and sticking by it doesn’t automatically make you lawful. Even a lot of chaotic characters have a very strict code they stick to, it just doesn’t fall in line with the law.

The definition I’ve generally seen used is that lawful characters think there is One True Moral Code for all that all should conform to, while chaotic characters feel morality is more personal and variable.

Given AG’s past actions, I’d definitely call her lawful–but good is maybe more debatable.

Huh. See, I’ve definitely heard it more as, “When in doubt about the morality of an action, lawful characters defer to the law almost all of the time, neutral characters defer to the law sometimes, and chaotic characters tend to assume laws are bad (or just prefer not to follow them) until proven otherwise.”

Obviously, there’s a scale to it that *really* should be more than three points. So, for example, if Absolute Lawful is a 10, Neutral is 5, and Chaotic is 1, I myself would be probably about a 9, which my friends find hilarious.

For a small example, I think weed should be legal in my state, and I’ve signed petitions and stuff supporting legalizing it. But, I’ve never smoked weed because I think drug laws should be voted on democratically, and since they have thusfar been voted as illegal, I shouldn’t break the law even if weed be relaxing for me. (I don’t have a medical reason to take it).

Also, I was the first of my friend group to report a friend-of-a-friend to Animal Protective Services and to the county dog warden for hoarding and abusing animals. (I mean serious abuse–flock of ducks locked in the basement, some starving, animal feces everywhere, one cat peeing blood). A certain chaotic-oriented friends’ plan was, “Just set all the animals free ourselves!” and many of my neutral friends were like, “We should talk to them” or even, “This isn’t something *I* would do, but we shouldn’t judge them.” And I was like, fuck that, I’m calling the authorities.

The only reason I’m not a 10 is because I believe in some cases there ought to be intentional, civil disobedience (for example, current ‘Sanctuary Movement’ in churches and temples protecting undocumented people from ICE, which I 100% support).

So, nine times out of ten, my moral alignment involves me following the law, and I only break the law as a close to last resort, if the law is cruel or inhuman (like immigration laws). I tend to assume that I’m not in the moral right automatically, so if what I want to do conflicts with a democratically created law, I’ll follow the law even if I don’t want to.

But! That doesn’t mean that I find my chaotic or neutral friends to be immoral. Chaotic and Neutral good people have done a lot of good in the world, and in a way I admire their confidence. They don’t seem to have that voice of self-doubt that I have, the one that says, “Well, I’m probably wrong.” This kind of goes back to my admiration of “jerk with a heart of gold” characters–they’re certain enough of their rightness that they act according to their own will rather than trying to follow the rules (whether they’re social rules or actual laws). Which helps in a lot of situations that I flounder in!

So, yeah. I think alignment is about internal orientation. When in doubt, follow the law, break the law, or disregard the law as motive?

You know, I honestly didn’t expect Dorothy to be so angry to her, although in retrospect it probably should have crossed my mind.

I really hope that Dorothy is more sympathetic once Amber says her piece, but something tells me she’s just going to be either angrier, or more scared of her. One thing is for sure though; next comic is going to be painful.

Is anyone else of the mind Dorothy is a massive jerk in this? She saved your life, Dorothy. GET OVER YOURSELF. I know this is a HORRIBLE attitude to have and Amber is dangerous to herself as well as others. But, seriously, what kind of person takes this attitude? How self-absorbed do you have to be to do this to someone just back?

I’m mostly baffled. I’m assuming that the falsehood she printed was that Amazigirl, not Amber, fought Ryan but I don’t get why that has her so angry. Is the deception something we already know or has it not been revealed yet?

I think the, um, falsehood she printed was that it wasn’t Amazi-Girl who hospitalized Blaine. Amazi-Girl told Dorothy that she wasn’t the one who did that, and, well, carefully-worded denials and all that.

…. so really, Dorothy, if you’re going to play the journalism game, you’ve got to accept carefully-worded denials as part of the price of doing business.

Nope, I agree, and I also don’t understand what “lie” got printed in the newspaper. Usually newspapers don’t print something like “amazi-girl did NOT attack Blaine O’Malley” because it’s not a story?

Also Dorothy knew who AG was at that point, so there is no way in hell she would even ask about someone related to AG and then print it. That’d be one step short of putting “AMAZI-GIRL LIVES HERE” on a banner outside Amber’s window.

It’s true but only because Amber lied to her. Their entire relationship, one that isn’t a secret since she’s interviewed Amazi-Girl at least once, is based on a lie. A lie that could easily get Dorothy in a lot of legal trouble if the truth comes out and people think Dorothy was covering up for her.

Dorothy did the “mindwipe” for Amber, instead of going all tabloid on her, carefully nurtured a source, and then Amber made Dorothy lie. That ranks right up there with things not to do to someone who trusts you.

Someone who could be arrested and have her entire future blown by aiding and covering up for a violent criminal and didn’t even realise it? That’s what Amber is, a violent, dangerous, unstable criminal. That her victims have mostly deserved what they got is just a technicality, Amazi-Girl’s activities are about as legal as they are healthy.

True, but not everything she’s done for Dorothy has been good. You don’t stop being a dangerous, violently unstable criminal just because you hospitalise someone worse than you. Amber needs help but until she starts being honest about herself to someone she’s not going to get it and they’re going to get mad at how they’ve treated her.
I’ll be surprised if Dorothy doesn’t apologise after hearing everything but as things stand right now Dorothy has every right to call her out on her actions.

Superman is emotionally stable and recognised by the authoritities of the world. Batman would be a better example and he IS a violently unstable criminal. They both seek targets for the sake of venting their issues and both go too far.

Amber’s only got one victim under her belt that I am aware of a the moment, and his fate being deserved was damn well more than a technicality.

As for Amazi-girl, she’s a criminal in the sense of being a vigilante but she has used a lot more restraint than Amber and the latter had a heaping wallop of self-defense necessitating the actions she took.

Being legal isn’t the end-all be-all of right and wrong, and Amber’s actions are legal while Amazi-girl’s are not necessarily always. But don’t reduce either of them to some unhinged criminal because that’s oversimplifying both the harm they HAVE done, would do, and what mental illness has to do with both.

I mean… kind of yeah. As far as we know, this is the first time meeting after the incident and instead of ‘thanks for saving me from being mauled/stabbed/or worse’ it’s ‘how dare you!?!!’ which seems a little… you should say thank you. Even though Amber lost it a little her first priority was still protecting Dorothy. She made sure Dorothy was safe first. And there were a lot of good reasons not to tell Dorothy the truth, more so than telling her the truth just to ask her to lie. It was early in their dynamic and it’s fair not to trust someone with that right off the bat. It also does protect Dorothy if it ever does come out and Amber gets charged. When talking to a reporter for an article, even one who says that they’re a fan, you shouldn’t give information that you aren’t okay having printed.

In Dorothy’s defense, I’m guessing that this is coming from the situation being a lot more over her head than she realized, and her freaking out about that, just like other aspects of her life, like grades, time management. Except this over-the-head thing is really dangerous so she’s panicking more. She got physically attacked because of her journalism. Amber is apparently a lot more dangerous and dark than she thought. She wasn’t prepared for any of that, so now she’s trying to prepare herself, to really know what she’s in. She wants agency. I don’t think that makes it okay, but I’m guessing that’s where it’s coming from.

I think Dorothy’s more upset about Amber betraying her trust rather than Amber getting her into a situation that’s over her head, because Dorothy shows she’s perfectly willing to obfuscate the truth in a newspaper, a situation that’s pretty dangerous for a journalist to do, so I doubt that she’d be panicking over the danger of printing a falsehood in the newspaper.

Plus, from Dorothy’s perspective, Amazi-girl straight up lied to her about attacking her father, instead of the technically true statement that Amazi-girl said. Add that on top of the lie coming from someome she considers a friend and she is being made complicit in that lie, and it’s pretty easy to see where Dorothy’s coming from.

On the other hand, while Dorothy needed to confront Amber about this at some point, it does seem pretty shitty of her to do it the day Amber came back, and that Dorothy didn’t even thank Amber for saving her life.

And Dorothy was keeping Amazi-Girl’s identity secret because she trusted her and thought she was genuinely a force for good. Now she’s gotten a glimpse of the violent rage and connected it with the other brutal beating on campus that Amazi-Girl apparently lied to her about and she’s likely wondering what else Amber’s lied about and what else she’s done and how complicit she is for keeping her secrets. Even if Amber did save her from Ryan.

Amber told her she was fine after Dorothy asked, and then she told Dorothy to “get on with” whatever was on her mind. It’s pretty hard to hold back your anger when the person you’re angry with tells you not to, to your face.

Overall, I do feel like Dorothy is in the wrong here, but not nearly to the extreme you’re making her out to be.

Not really. Her life being saved by Amber doesn’t mean she should act like things are all good between them when they aren’t and Amber herself pushed her to say what was on her mind because she could tell there was something bothering her.

In Dorothy’s mind right now, the AG or Amber thing is just semantics so it very much feels like Amber lied to her for her own personal gain and is using a technicality as an excuse for it, which would be a strong betrayal of trust for someone like Dorothy.

There is a big difference between knowing you are obscuring the truth and doing it of your own will, and feeling like you have been manipulated into it with no agency in the matter after the fact, and like you were purposely kept ignorant.

Dorothy is angry but presenting clearly why she is upset and angry and not only that, but she let Amber decide to press her rather than wanting to go right into it from the get go. From her own perspective, Dorothy has every reason to be upset and is still going about it perfectly reasonably by letting Amber decide if she was willing to deal with this right now and is laying out exactly why she is upset: you did this thing and broke my trust, I would have done X if you were honest, but you gave me no choice, I didn’t need shielded from the truth.

I don’t think she is being a jerk or is in the wrong to feel this way with the information she has because she doesn’t truly understand how deep the Amber-AG split actually goes so it feels like her friend went ‘I trust you’ then deceived and manipulated her for her own purposes.

That’s what gets into it a bit. Yes, Amber saved her life and that means something, but Dorothy is not a perfect being. She’s a human being with emotions and those emotional feelings are valid.

And right now, she has a lot of complicated feelings about Amber/AG and this is her attempt to try and express those complicated feelings and express the ways she feels hurt because that hurt is in there.

And it’s all wrapped up in the fact that this is likely Dorothy’s first time dealing with a multiple system, especially one hammering this hard on full dissociation and so there’s a lot of confusion here towards the compartmentalization that Amber/AG lives in.

@Alt-text: Whoa whoa whoa whoa! That’s out of bounds! You’re not supposed to use the phrase “fake news” when you’re ACTUALLY REFERRING TO NEWS THAT’S BEEN FAKED! The phrase clearly refers to TRUE news that you don’t like!

I know she did the interview, but…was Amazi-Girl not attacking someone really something that got printed? Or even part of the question set? Dorothy had already decided not to go talk to Blaine because she already knew Amber was Amazi-Girl…

I don’t really understand Dorothy’s reaction here, tbh. Who sees someone in a cape and decides “yeah that person is mentally stable and definitely honest”

Not reporting that story, which probably would have been a bad idea if she knew about it, is not even lying by omission.
What’s this not-true thing she published? She specifically said that Amazi-Girl didn’t beat up that particular criminal? That would be a weird thing to mention.

And I don’t really know… Somebody getting a severe beating that gets them hospitalised, that’s probably always good enough a story for a local university newspaper. Heck, apparent lack of motive can even make it more mysterious and scary.

Well, yes. Dorothy asked Amazi-girl point-blank if she attacked Blaine or not, during their interview (I hope that works).

I don’t see why that would be a weird question to ask, or why it would be weird for Dorothy to print it along with all the other Amazi-girl-related stuff she was writing. After family fun weekend practically everybody on Amber’s floor knew that Blaine was abusive. Known abusive asshole gets beaten bloody after visiting his daughter’s campus, which just happens to be home to a juvenile vigilante… even for those who don’t already know Amber’s secret, it wouldn’t be hard to put two and two together.

As for your last question: uh, pretty much everybody who read comics or watched cartoons as a kid, I imagine.

On top of having a high opinion of her to start with, Dorothy hasn’t yet been given a reason to doubt Amber’s/Amazi-girl’s integrity. This is the first lie she’s caught Amber in, and Dorothy hasn’t been around for Amazigirl’s stalking of Sal. So far Dorothy has only seen/heard of the better side of Amazigirl: fighting bullies, saving Becky, ect.

With all empathy and concern for what Dorothy’s been through after Wednesday…this right here? Taking the first opportunity to jump Amber and accuse her of this shit?

When Dorothy was the one that forced herself into AG’s orbit in the first place? When Dorothy was the one stalking AG for interviews despite obviously not being welcome?

When Dorothy, after having found AG’s civilian identity, held an unquestionably disproportionate amount of the power in her favor throughout their entire ‘professional’ relationship after the interviews did start?

And when Amber’s first and only display of hard and brutal violence in Dorothy’s presence was to save Dorothy’s life from a serial rapist, not to mention Joyce’s life–and the total justification of the aforementioned violence was something Dorothy has already rationally stated she understands?

Going off on Amber like this the day she gets back is just shitty. It’s a shitty thing to do.

Dorothy still doesn’t know all the facts here and if she actually wanted to, she’s had three days to knock down Danny’s door another time for answers about what happened with Blaine. But no. Dorothy is mad at herself for believing what she wanted to believe, writing as an enthusiast and not a journalist, buying into a narrative that she pushed onto AG and Amber first and far more than they did in return. And she’s taking it out on the girl who Dorothy coerced into trusting her in the first place, not the other way around. It’s selfish anger disguised as integrity in her own mind and it’s not even anger at Amber, really, but self-directed if I had to guess, and it ultimately doesn’t matter yet.

I still think it’s just a really shitty thing of Dorothy to do in this strip. She doesn’t know what happened with Blaine, but what happened with Ryan doesn’t point in any way to Amber being some unrestrained violent criminal who’d assault a person without a justification like self-defense. Or interpersonal defense. Danny was there; Dorothy ignored his warnings for the narrative she wanted and continued doing so and that’s a human mistake (and one he’s made too, for different reasons).

Pretty much, the fact she considers a COLLEGE NEWSPAPER more important than her having her life saved and all the trauma Amber went through shows Dorothy has a lot of growing up before she’s in any position I’d want her to be elected.

No kidding. I could see Dorothy asking, reasonably and with concern, “so what really happened?” but to actually go off on Amber for lying about it? Gosh, Dorothy, I can’t imagine why someone would lie about getting into a fistfight with their own father to someone they didn’t yet know very well. Clearly your outrage over unknowingly posting a lie for your college paper should be the priority here, as opposed to any theoretical problems Amber certainly wasn’t dealing with as a result.

Feeling hurt about seeing the capacity of violence Amber showed, knowing it’s wrong to talk about that, still feeling hurt anyway, having that hurt leak out into an acceptable alternative that lets her feel like the injured party.

Emotions, man. Hurt always finds ways to leak out even when it’s irrational. Even when you don’t want to acknowledge the real source of it because it feels stupid.

Well, actually being more concerned with the truth than your personal safety is actually a pretty good characteristic for either a reporter or an elected official. Certainly better than “You helped me out, so I’m going to let this slide.”

Nor at this point does Dorothy know anything like what we do about Amber’s trauma.

Dorothy isn’t accusing Amber of being an “unrestrained violent criminal.” All she’s doing is confronting Amber about the fact that Amber lied to her.

Dorothy asked if Amber was okay, and Amber said she was. Then Amber encouraged Dorothy to spit out what was on her mind. They were going to have this conversation at some point; if Amber wasn’t ready for it, then she shouldn’t have prodded Dorothy into it.

As for going to Danny and getting the facts, 1) for all we know, Dorothy has talked to Danny since the Ryan incident, 2) Danny wasn’t the one who lied to her, Amber was.

Dorothy is essentially accusing Amber of not giving her (Dorothy) the choice of whether to lie or not in her report; i.e., not telling Dorothy the complete truth about what happened to Blaine.

Even if Amazi-girl had lied (technically, she did not, and I don’t blame her for not disclosing the extent of explanation required) she would have been more than justified in doing so because, again, as Danny said–it wasn’t Dorothy’s business outside of Dorothy being a reporter. If Dorothy’s main objective had actually been actually reporting, instead of telling the story she wanted to in the first place selling the campus vigilante as a hero, she’d have (1) taken Danny’s refusal to talk and his warning as the alarm bells they were, and with that in mind (2) used more than Amazi-girl’s word as the final word in the paper.

Amazi-girl had no reason to tell Dorothy the whole truth even if the trust they had was wholly real from the start. And it wasn’t. Amber feeling like she owed Dorothy for not disclosing AG’s secret identity was the reason she consented to the first interview, at the very least. Dorothy is asking a goddamn lot of Amber (who again, wasn’t lying–not that Dorothy can or has a right to know this or why it’s true) to demand outright that yes, Amber-as-Amazi-girl indeed should have admitted in full to beating her own father and running from the scene for the sake of Dorothy’s accuracy in writing, as an extracurricular, for the student newspaper. When it was plainly obvious to Amber, Amazi-girl, Danny, and unfortunately not Dorothy that the latter was biased to the point where she desperately WANTED the answer AG gave her. And now Dorothy’s getting angry that she took the gift for what it was.

Dorothy was only ever the journalist. Not Amber. Certainly not Amazi-girl. Neither of the latter two had any reason to care whether Dorothy’s articles were accurate. Their aim was wanting Dorothy to like and to continue being an ally to Amazi-girl. And to protect Dorothy. Amber protected Dorothy.

Dorothy shouldn’t have expected Amber to adhere to her own standards of journalistic integrity, especially when Dorothy herself made it painfully clear she didn’t want to hear the answer AG was omitting and Danny was hiding about Blaine.

And I think the reason it matters that Dorothy is bringing up this lie about Blaine now is because Blaine’s attack was serious and Dorothy didn’t want to think, at the time, that Amazi-girl would do something so violent. Then she saw Amber do something extremely violent. And that’s the real reason it may be causing such a violent reaction from Dorothy now, instead of being lied to. Dorothy didn’t want her idol to be someone that was frightening instead of heroic, or to admit that she’d overlooked something that merited further investigation because of her own bias. But now Amber’s stabbed someone, meaning Amber could have attacked Blaine, meaning Dorothy has something to lash out against when she reexamines her own actions and realizes she wasn’t being a good journalist and that the scary, up-close reality of violent vigilantism is no longer an idealistic fantasy but a traumatic memory. So she takes it out on Amber. This is, again, a very human mistake to make, and other characters have done so countless times.

The difference here is that Dorothy’s target of this anger is the same girl that just saved her life, and Joyce’s, and Dorothy is not giving even a moment’s consideration in front of Amber for either of those good things before launching into the bad. Whether Amber prompted her or not that is a goddamn shitty thing to omit to someone who’s undoubtedly traumatized as badly as you are and because they risked their life for you–and all this over the pretense of ‘Amber lied.’

You know, Dorothy was one of my favourite characters. But I just can’t respect her willingness to “obfuscate the truth when it’s the right thing to do.”

I’m guessing that most readers here, myself included, agree with Dorothy’s wish to protect Amber/Amazi-Girl. But lying for the “right” reasons cuts both ways and is a slippery slope. I’m a U.S.ian and right now my country is dealing with the ugly reality of what happens when people decide to “edit” the truth for what they may think are the “right” reasons. The issue of what is “right” varies wildy depending on who you are, where you are, and when you are. And we know from history that obfuscating the truth has been a way for maniacs to seize and maintain power.

I have some journalist colleagues who I am 110% sure would have MUCH stronger things to say about Dorothy’s journalist “ethics” than I do.

For the record, I would like to note that my new gravatar does NOT, I hope reflect my actual teaching career, from my days as a TA and Adjunct Faculty until now.

While I don’t always agree with how Willis portrays educators, I will say that he correctly shows that overall it’s a really bad idea and very unprofessional to get personally involved with your students. The last time that happened to me was accidental and it didn’t end well. I went out to a concert with one of my friends and we met up with some of her other friends, one of whom turned out to be one of my current students (my friend did not know this). I probably should have just gone home at that point (this was a bunch of years ago – if this ever happens again I WILL) but I’d paid for the ticket and wanted to have a good time with my friend. I landed up drinking and hanging out with my friend and my student. I was not inappropriate in any way but I did treat my student more like a friend than a student.

Things got weird afterwards. Since I honestly liked the student and had enjoyed spending time with her socially, I had to constantly “check” myself to make sure I wasn’t showing her any favourtism in class. On her end, the student really started over-stepping boundaries. She needed recommendation letters (which I’m always more than happy to write) but would demand them with no notice and offer to come to my home to pick them up. Again, I’m well aware that she was only over-stepping boundaries because I did first – once again, if I’m ever in that situation in future, I will just go home and not “party” with any of my students.

tl:dr – it can be easy to over-step boundaries between students and instructors. However, it’s on the instructor to be careful about that and set and maintain those boundaries.

“Again, I’m well aware that she was only over-stepping boundaries because I did first”

ehh, I’m skeptical of that. It sounds like she has boundary issues of her own, and your mistake was just a catalyst. It also kinda sounds like you think that your one boundary fail means you forfeit the right to future boundaries, and that’s wrong.

@deathjavu: As far as I know (and I’m not a journalist), in the U.S. sources are legally allowed to remain anonymous for reasons of safety. Which leads me to…

@Felgraf: This is where things get complicated in my head. I am RABIDLY anti-censorship. I agree that “naming names” can be very directly harmful. For example, after Charlottesville, a lot of people online were doxxing the white supremecists. While ideologically I support this, in at least one case it led to an innocent person being harrassed. There was a white supremecist wearing a University of Arizona sweatshirt who apparently kind of looked like a professor at U Arizona. When the prof. was “identified,” he received death threats and the college was swamped with calls for his firing. The prof. has since proven that he was thousands of miles away at the time, in the company of some of his colleagues, and has said even if he HAD been in Charlottesville he never would have taken part in any white supremecist action. Yet he is still getting death threats from people who don’t know it wasn’t him. The doxxers who incorrectly identified him say they were just trying to get the “truth” out there about white supremecists who might prefer to hide behind Klan hoods.

By that same token, I DO want people who do terrible things to be held responsible for the things they do…

I just don’t know. I think there is a difference between protecting people’s identities for their own safety and obfuscating the truth for various reasons. @deathjavu, as a contemporary real world analogy, I might reference the way that, in contemporary U.S. news, Joe Arpaio’s career is being “spun” differently by different news outlets. If you listen to President Trump, Arpaio is a patriot who fought unceasingly against “illegal immigrants.” I personally think Trump is deliberately obfuscating the truth of Arpaio’s tenure as sheriff because he thinks it is the “right” thing to do. But if you read news outlets like “The New York Times” or “NPR” you’ll find out that Arpaio did a lot of really really REALLY terrible things.

Again, I am conflicted. But maybe the important question in terms of the ethics of witholding information is, “Who benefits?” I personally tend to think that having more information is seldom a bad thing.

None of that has anything to do with censorship. Also, you switched to supporting not reporting stuff there.

Trump isn’t obfuscating anything. He’s a liar. He lies about literally everything, knows very little about anything to begin with, and he also has evil and criminal motives. He sure as Hell wouldn’t care about doing the right thing even if he did know what it was, which he’s never pretended. In this case, he probably neither knows nor cares to know anything about the full extent of Arpaio’s crimes, but knows that he’s a racist and criminally in contempt of court which are two things he likes fully knowing that they are evil. So he lies.
That has nothing to do with anything.

I have absolutely no problem with lying when it’s done for the right reasons. Just like I have no problem with violence for the right reasons. Everything is a god damn slippery slope if you’re not clear on what you consider the “right reasons”.

Dorothy protecting the identity of someone who risked her life to save someone else on multiple occasions is definitely the right reason.

Yeah, but what are the “right reasons?” You say it’s a slippery slope and I agree completely. But the idea of right and wrong is also slippery depending on who you are, where you are, and when you are.

I’m disagreeing about the slippery slope. If you ignore context and just look at things incredibly vaguely, everything looks like a slippery slope.

Lying to protect someone isn’t a slippery slope unless the next time you do it you ONLY look at the general similarities. If Amber had murdered someone in cold blood, lying to protect her would be wrong. Dorothy is not the sort of person to overlook that simply because she had lied to protect Amber before.

I am conflicted, per usual. At what point do we say that Amber/Amazi-Girl’s actions don’t warrant “protection?” As a female reader who has experienced sexism, misogyny, and sexual assault, it has been very emotionally cathartic to see her take “revenge” on men who have done terrible things. However, I also strongly espouse non-violence as a vehicle of change. Amber/Amazi-Girl has committed crimes. The fact that I personally feel her actions were justified doesn’t mean I get (in some imaginary improbable cross-over between DoA and the physical world) to lie to protect her.

I also stand by my comment about the relativity of “rightness” and I do NOT think it’s “incredibly vague.” Trying to figure out what’s “right” keeps me up at night. Is it “right” to punch a Nazi (as much of the internet would have you believe)? Is it “right” to execute someone who has killed people? Is it “right” to pardon a man who claimed he was “keeping America safe?” Is it “right” to continue a 16-year-long war because ISIL is still around?

I don’t know. I just don’t. I had a birthday recently and I’m getting pretty dang old. I used to think that when I was older I’d understand things better, but I don’t. If anything, I’m more confuzzed than I was a decade ago. 😕

you might say incarcerating people is a slippery slope towards wrongful detention and human rights violations and hey! it’s true! it’s a possibility and something that definitely shouldn’t happen!

but does that mean we have to be absolutist and scrap all jails and the justice system? I find that solution ridiculous.
like I’m the last person who’d say the prison system is even mildly okay as it is (there’s a reason it’s called the prison industrial complex), but it’s much preferable to improve it and observe it carefully than to scrap the whole idea

like Fart Captor says: EVERYTHING can be a slippery slope to bad things. There’s literally no activity that’s 100% perfect and harmless. Everything can be done in excess and for harm. The solution should be watch out of doesn’t become that way

I have THOUGHTS about the prison system in the U.S. (Not only have I read a lot about this, but my mom was a court pyschologist in a large city that had a majority population of working-class/poor PoC and she told me many horror stories about being an underprivileged PoC who is incarcerated in this country.)

Nevertheless, I do NOT think we need to “scrap all jails and the justice system.” I’m not an anarchist; I believe that we actually do need law and order. However, IMHO it seems like “law and order” in the U.S. right now is being determined by the old rich white het men who currently run this country. I don’t really believe that we need to tear everything down; I honestly think that would be more harmful than helpful. But I think we DO need to seriously re-evaluate the current system.

Going back to the idea of “obfuscating” the truth for the “right reasons;” well, currently in the U.S. a LOT of people feel it’s okay to “obfuscate” the racist truth of the Civil War for the “right reasons” of preserving “Southern Pride” and “history.” I’ve no doubt that a lot of people claiming that honestly feel that way and think they are in the “right” when they brandish the Confederate flag and defend monuments to Robert E. Lee.

In my eyes, they are so far from being “right” that they couldn’t see it even with the help of the Hubble Telescope. Yet I’m aware that many of my own beliefs would be judged as not “right” by many of them and, I’m guessing, even some people in this comments section. Again, trying to figure this out is giving me insomnia. 😕

I beg to differ. Of course, there are some things that most (but, sadly, not all) people tend to say are not “right.” Nazis are bad. Slavery is bad. Oppressing and judging someone based on the colour of their skin and/or their culture is bad. I’m guessing you and most readers here can get behind those statements.

However, I’m apparently wearing my heart on my sleeve and word-vomiting my feels all over the comments section tonight (not that I haven’t done this before…). Here are some things I believe that I’m betting not everyone here thinks are “right:”

1.) The death penalty is inhumane.
2.) All women have the right to have an abortion.
3.) Everyone deserves afforable quality healthcare.
4.) Everyone deserves access to affordable (if not free) high-quality education.
5.) The wealthiest people in the U.S. should be taxed. A LOT.
6.) U.S. society and government should actively work to recognize and ensure equal rights for women, Queer people, and people of colour.
7.) U.S. society should actively strip power and money from rich white heternormative men.
8.) The U.S. should move from a flawed capitalism to a more socialist society.
9.) African-American people and Native Americans/First Nation people deserve reparations from their oppressors, including the U.S. government.
10.) Non-violent protest is the best way to effect change; violence only rebounds upon itself.

I’m guessing that a lot of people here, maybe including yourself, disagree with some of what I call “right.” It’s really NOT that easy. (To be fair, I should amend: it’s really not that easy for ME.) Maybe you have a better sense of right and wrong than I do. I don’t know. All I know is that I continue to struggle with this and the more I read and the more people I talk to, the more confuzzed I become.

We literally aren’t dealing with anybody lying for any “right” reasons.
We’re dealing with people who outright say “I am lying to you to steal from you and am a bad person. Um, also people who repeat what I just said are lying to you.”

Like, of course you lie to protect people. That has pretty much never been debated by anybody.
And for journalists that’s more about choosing what not to publish than lying, anyway.

Thank you very much. That was a very interesting article. I’ll freely admit that I wasn’t an unbiased reader because I have Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. My maternal grandfather was a POW in the German camps and my German/Polish partner had several relatives in the death camps.

I nevertheless maintain there is a difference between “naming names” (such as to a Nazi stormtrooper) and concealing the truth in service of what you think is “right.” Perhaps that’s a disinegenous distinction; I will continue to think more about this.

Somehow, I’m reminded of a story Starhawk told (I think it was in Dreaming the Dark) of trying to use consensus a s a decision tool always. They were in prison after protesting a nuclear weapons base. Or rather, not a real real prison but some other facility used to hold the protestors after being arrested. They were asked by the authorities if they’d rather have additional (hundreds?) detained in the same, already full facility with them or if they should be put in another with no means to communicate.
Trying to decide this by consensus failed. Starhawk concluded that consensus couldn’t work in a situation like that as they was no freedom to act, invent other solutions, …

On a slightly lighter note: in the 1970ties a British comic magazine for girls (it might have been Judy) carried a story about a girl in boarding school who decided to always tell the whole truth after her lying for a friend ended with said fried severely hurt in hospital.
It’s a total disaster for the protagonist, gets her hated by everyone and at the end of the story she’s considering suicide (just for the friend to reappear and get her back to lying and living by taking responsibility from the stuff that got her to hospital and relieving the guilt and shame of the protagonist.)

(This is all my interpretation as a reader; I am not a mental health expert by any stretch of the imagination. Please don’t get mad if this is all royally screwed up! I fix silicon brains, not squishy grey brains!)

The core of it is that she sees Amber as irredeemably worthless, mostly thanks to her father’s emotional abuse. In the convenience store robbery flashback, we see that she was already introverted and incredibly self-conscious before that day. The encounter with Sal, her feeling of helplessness when Ethan is taken hostage, and her father’s needling all put together made something snap, and she acted out her internalized rage in a violent manner (stabbing Sal with her own knife). The police apparently wrote it off as a terrified victim thing, and of course Blaine wouldn’t do anything about it, so this was brushed off. Everyone else has long since moved past that day, but part of Amber is still there.

Amazi-Girl started off as a golden alter for her to start over with (even though nobody at IU knew Amber except for Mike and Ethan, so she had a mostly clean slate anyway). She started off deliberately separating the alters, but the split has been growing on its own. She’s still mostly in control over which alter is in the driver’s seat, except in cases where one completely locks up (for example when she saw Danny talking with Sal). Both alters seem to remember everything they both do, as most individuals would remember what they did.

She definitely has PTSD from the convenience store hold-up and anger issues caused by (and inherited from) her father. The split between Amber and Amazi-Girl seems like DID, but as far as we can tell she’s not experiencing any amnesia, and for the most part deliberately controls which personality is in charge.

There’s… not really much to say about Alex. Alex has been in a total of 5 strips. She’s a bit part. Her transition (apparently based on her real-life-inspiration?) might be fodder for an interesting storyline, but that storyline hasn’t manifested yet.

She’s basically apathetic-teacher who transitioned and possibly became engaged-teacher. None of which really represents me.

yet again Amber sounds like my abusive ex-girlfriend. Really starting to wonder if there’s an ex of Willis’ out there who also used the line “I was manipulating you into breaking up with me” right before trying to kill herself because this is sketchily on point so far.

Dorothy… There’s no harm in asking Why before going off on someone like that. Even accounting for her ignorance about Amber’s dissociation, she must have realised by Now, post Ryan slashing, that there’s a lot Amber is repressing, a lot Dorothy doesn’t know about her for all she thinks she knows about Amazigirl. Asking a possible manipulator if they were manipulating you is redundant in a lot of situations but it was needed here.

Dotty, you totally missed what the first answer you got actually said. Not really astonishing considering you don’t know about DID and stuff. You are not a psych mayor, ok. But, next time someone gives you an answer that seems like ducking responsibility or making no sense at all, throw in a “what exactly do you mean?” before deciding to jump in their face.

So now we will get what Amber thinks is the unvarnished truth about herself. Big question here: Will Dotty see which parts are true and where Amber condemns herself unnecessarily? Will she be able to understand what Amber tells her? And not be stuck with her own hurt sense of self-worth?

That’s the trick innit. You need to hear what Amber is saying (that she isn’t ‘normal’) without taking at face value everything she thinks about herself (that she is a monster). It’s hard to have that kind of discretion and Dorothy isn’t a mental health professional.

In this strip, Amber says, “Amazi-girl didn’t lie to you. It was me, not her.”

That statement there is a lie. On the interview strip, where Amazi-girl said, “It wasn’t me,” there is no Amber tag. Everyone wants to pretend it’s not “technically” a lie, but it was. And even if it wasn’t, my point was that it was Amazi-girl making the statement, not Amber.

It’s really something when relatively-normal people profess to be entitled to and equipped to deal with the truth about you. I am not saying Dorothy is in the wrong for feeling betrayed and locked out – she was. AG knew that Dorothy doesn’t know she and Amber are a multiple system and thus also knew how Dorothy would understand her denial of attacking Blaine. But I can also see why Amber-AG would meet any attempt to “know the truth about” or “understand” them (especially considering Dorothy’s approach to it here) with hostility and disbelief. Relatively-stable and together people with supportive family very rarely react well or respectfully to the reality of those who have different circumstances. It gets hard to always give them the benefit of the doubt.

Seriously, Dorothy. The last time you saw her, she shoved you in a building to take on a knife-waving serial rapist on her own. And your very next interaction is to get all up in her face about your journalistic integrity? JFC.

I wasn’t really speaking in a legal sense. If the police don’t feel like charging Amber with anything, that’s fine. But Dorothy was clearly terrified by whatever Amber was doing to Ryan.

I highly doubt Amber was incapable of subduing him without putting him in critical condition. And I don’t think we can 100% confirm that Ryan never made any attempt to flee. Who says Amber didn’t just keep him there by force?

The gist of it is that no, Amber subduing Ryan became a much more dangerous matter once he escalated to deadly force. Not that she was able to do it before even with Sal’s help. She couldn’t know she could subdue him for long enough, or that she’d be able to do it before he could get the knife back, or pull out or find a second weapon. Even if she could do it, she couldn’t be sure she could do it without being injured badly, or at all. She had no obligation to risk her own safety or Dorothy’s in order to ensure Ryan’s.

But as for who’s to say that Amber didn’t keep Ryan there by force? The police, who saw it on tape and decided her actions were justified. If she had stopped him from trying to flee, that absolutely would not be justifiable self-defense, even in the legal sense. It’s very unlikely that they would’ve just let her go after seeing that.

Dorothy hasn’t got it yet, has she? She’s still failing to understand the subtext of what Amber’s saying. Of course, who can blame her? How many times do you have to correctly interpret statements to the effect that your neighbour has two or more people in her head?

I wonder if WIllis is taking us a bit on a journey with Dorothy that she’s actually showing what happens to characters who really are from loving, supportive, and happy homes. Dorothy is a wonderful person by and large but she’s also clearly not used to disappointment or being treated as less than the apple of her parents eye. She’s Lawful GoodTM with a capital L but here she’s worried about what amounts to nonexistent journalistic integrity over a person’s actual pain. Everything is deadly serious for Dorothy in college but it’s a life and death struggle for Amber every day. In short, she just doesn’t get it.

Amber can dismiss a concerned friend or a wanna-be-RA busybody, but it’s harder to dismiss someone with her own part of the trauma and a genuine grievance. I THINK it’s a good thing that Amber talks about it, but poor Dotty is FAR out of her comfort zone.

I’m so proud of her. This is the same Dorothy who drank rocket fuel with Billie and had a tough conversation with Joyce about Ryan. The one who does her best to help people even when it’s tough. That’s why she would have been a good RA, not because some fumbling clipboarding.

Dotty is aiming to become the President. You don’t get there (especially as a woman) by cutting corners and doing half-okay job. She is building up both a reputation and proper work ethics. And that means taking the job seriously no matter whether you work at a school paper or say, New York Times. You start doing a lacklustre job here and it will contaminate your work ethics there.

Yeah, it’s almost like she struggles with perfectionist standards for herself based on the ludicrous standards we hold women politicians to and is frequently doing harm to herself and her ability to hold it all down by trying to force herself to that standard, giving 100% to everything when that’s physically impossible.

I meant more collective standards. Where the overall expectation on women running tends to be “never ever have made a mistake”, whereas for white men it is often more forgiving, especially of harms done on those who are marginalized.

See how Clinton was treated by the public versus how Trump was and the standards she would have been held to versus the standards for Presidential we hold Trump to now.

The question is. Did they have an issue with Clinton as a woman or with the fact that she did not address the problems of typical Americans while Trump took advantage of “Bringing jobs back”, “Stopping Mexican and Muslim immigration” and “Making America great again.

Fighting for equality, homo and trans rights and all that is nice but those are minority issues which most of the society care little about. And Trump at least pretended he sided with the average Joe no one else cared about.

Or at least that’s the impression I got, I’m not exactly into US politics.

Well one of those standards involves being allowed to get away with blatantly lying and not even expected to tell the truth.
Having actual plans and proposals to help with the very things you’re “not even pretending to care about”.

Mind you, in addition to the standards being different for women, they’re also different for Democrats.

There’s literally spools of information Clinton gave out regarding all of the things people claim she “never” talked about because for too many the complaint wasn’t about that at all but about her being a woman daring to be “uppity” and “seek power”.

There’s a special place in Hell for pundits who now, all of a sudden, are discovering that a certainly someone has neither the knowledge, intellectual curiosity, or temperment to be in the White House.

I agree with what some others said, namely I don’t get Dotty’s anger here. So she was lied to, but the topic of the lie wasn’t exactly world shattering, nor related to her emotional core.
I wonder if her trauma is somehow coloring her reaction here, but it honestly doesn’t feel like it.

It’s definitely trauma-related. She witnessed something horrific, and the one biggest reminder she’s been able to avoid after Wednesday through the weekend has finally returned in the form of the girl in her nightmares this week that shares the half-bath.

Dorothy doesn’t handle feelings of helplessness well. She has to “do” to get “better.” There has a lot of feelings about Amber that Dorothy doesn’t know how to handle yet, but the fear and uncertainty is much easier to bury under something like anger and conviction when you’re an A-type.

I think that seeing what Amber did to Ryan made Dorothy realize the darker side to the whole vigilantism thing. How many other people did Amber brutalize? How close is she to actually crippling or killing people? She suddenly realized that a Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderman has potential to become Unfriendly Neighbourhood Punisher or Rorschach.

That she goes on about her journalistic integrity at the point is a bit of bullshit hiding the main point. She trusted Amazi-Girl and Amber (not knowing they were two different alters of the same physical being) and therefore
a) thinks she was lied to because she doesn’t know AG and Amber only speak for themselves
b) from her pov, her trust was betrayed
c) she has seen a person she trusted badly hurt the guy who came after her in self-defense.

Realizing someone you trusted is capable of severe violence against another person is in itself a rather shattering experience, even if it was in your own defense. Finding out at the same time that this person you trusted lied to you, makes it a real rabitthole of doubt and self-doubt.

She needs to find out “what is real” – for herself, not because of journalistic integrity – and the problem is that that is so strange and complex she might not be able to get it.

I agree with some other commenters that Dorothy is in some ways much to naive and inexperienced to have what it needs to become president. Leadership is always about understanding people and dealing with trust and distrust alike, not about knowing lots of topics in depth. And she still thinks it’s about knowing enough.

She also realizes that this isn’t the first time Amber’s hurt someone badly. She’d trusted her when AG said she didn’t attack Blaine, but now she’s seeing a pattern of not just severe violence, but also of violent rage.

Dorothy is wrong to yell at Amber about ‘lying’ because Dorothy believed that a costumed superhero would be of sound mind. Dorothy put her on a pedestal and did not question the sanity and reality of vigilante justice at all. She willingly ignored all the warning signs that it was not as amazing and admirable as she thought it was. There were plenty of these warning signs; some of them were statements from Amber/Amazi-girl. But Dorothy was too blinded by her own naivety and idolisation to realise that there could be bad things beneath the surface. Don’t blame others for your own action of putting someone on a pedestal.

You know… when you think about it, it makes sense that Dotty put Amazi-girl on the pedestal. She comes from a culture where Super Heroes are someone you should aspire to be, they are treated as paragons of justice and right, not (considering all the tragic backstories) seriously disturbed individuals desperately needing help. Dotty’s anger is understandable, Amber dressed up as a super hero and then turned out to be a maniac, soiling the concept of Super hero.

When Ryan attacked, Dorothy may have had no idea that Amber was capable of what she did. Why? Dorothy believed Amber wasn’t the person who trashed Blaine, and might have thought all Amber did was some low-level fighting.

IE: The other superhero acts, like beating up a single purse-snatcher or creepy stalker, don’t compare to what was visited on Blaine and Ryan.

Though it’s worth remembering that it would have had an awful ending if Amazi-Girl wasn’t there too. Becky gone and likely taken to be “fixed”. Even if she’d escaped she would have stayed on the run to keep Ross from threatening her friends.

Not necessarily. Toedad came to a school campus with a gun and kidnapped his daughter. He’d have to hide or law enforcement would hunt him down. With that stunt he basically threw away any chance at having his old life back.

I think the message Willis was trying to send was fuck the way that typically plays out in fiction, and especially fuck the way it would far too often play out in real life. Everyone around Becky stands up and fights for her in whatever way they can, and Becky wins.

Yes, AG was reckless in the way she went about it. Yes, it’s lucky nobody got killed. No, Becky would not have been better off if AG had stayed out of it entirely.

I don’t even think Amazi-Girl was particularly reckless in how she went about it – other than trying to do it in the first place, which was probably more like impossible than reckless. She shouldn’t even have been able to get close enough to the car to get a rope on it, much less all the rest of the stunts – in a realistic genre that is.
But Amazi-Girl’s never been part of a realistic genre. She’s always played by something closer to action movie or lower end super hero genre rules. Sal too, to a somewhat lesser extent.
There’s emotional realism and the rest of the characters aren’t action heroes, so that clashes sometimes and throws reader’s expectations off.

No one would bat an eye at that sequence in a Bond flick. Other than it being a little boring.

I will concede that Amber was lying on the technicality that she didn’t say the complete truth, which I personally believe isn’t the same as saying actually false statements. Dorothy’s idolisation however contributed to her not questioning the true but incomplete statements.

Superheroes are still people, and people have flaws. Many fictional superheroes in comics are depicted as flawless, but that’s a fantasy. In reality people make mistakes and have all kinds of problems. And they don’t dress up to punch people regularly, unless they’ve got some issues to work out.

Tbh even not knowing about Amber’s identity disparity I don’t really get why Dotty sees it as a lie/doesn’t get it.it wasn’t donr as amazi-girl or for the sake of protecting the students, it was done as amber fighting a personal battle and therefore isn’t really an amazi-girl story except in the sense of blowing her cover, and while Dorothy may blame her for lying by not outing herself or confessing as Amber, it’s rather unreasonable to expect her to risk going to court for assault for a college newspaper article to be accurate.

I think Dotty’s mad because she wouldn’t have outed Amber or printed something that would’ve risked her getting in legal trouble (I’m pretty sure that’s what she means in panel 3). She trusted Amber enough to not doubt that what happened to Blaine was necessary, but she thinks Amber didn’t trust her not to expose her.

I understand why Amber didn’t trust her, but I also get why Dorothy is upset. She thought they had built mutual trust between them, but this makes her feel like Amber doesn’t really trust her

Psss, Dorothy, you can kick your own arse for all I care. You didn’t double check Amber/Amazigirl’s story, and never reviewed if Amazigirl’s vigilantism was safe or sane for the public (that includes anyone battered by Amazigirl for whatever reasons, just or not). You goofed on your part. OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM. That is to say, to investigate carefully, not to sell a pretty story from a comfy bourgeois viewpoint. There’s good on you, but there’s also a lot for you to work on. Same for Amber/Amazigirl. Now Amber’s gotta spill the real deal to you.

There is an analogy in my own experience. I used to think a kidney stone was just about the worst pain possible. Then I found out that some kidney stones are way worse than others. And then I found out that there are things worse than kidney stones. So when people who have never had so much as a laceration needing stitches give me advice on pain management I just smile and nod. They really have no idea. (And I realize there are people who know things about pain that I hope I never find out.)

Dorothy is like that in a different way. She does not have perspective on the ethical landscape. That will have to come with painful experience – and given the power of the journalistic pen, it will be other people’s pain.

It reminds me of Chloe on Smallville who was editor of the high school paper, and was way too impressed with her journalistic integrity.
She thought it would be a good idea to start digging around in Clark Kent’s adoption, for a class assignment to write about a classmate. There’s a time to just get over yourself and that would be one. Also, “Thank you for saving me from the vengeful knife-wielding rapist” would be a good start.

The second part is that, due to the unavailability of mental health care for various reasons (stigma, toxic family dynamic, etc) Amber may not have a very clear idea as to what is hurting her. Many commenters have said she could have DID and she sure looks like a strong candidate for PTSD but she’s been on her own dealing with those terrible problems. I believe the majority of people struggling with mental health issues are similarly alone and without help.*

And Dorothy will be one step removed in understanding whatever explanation Amber comes up with.

*(As much reason as anyone could need to never stigmatize mental health issues in any way)

Like, not having to spend huge chunks of your childhood focusing just on survival or suffering pain gives you a lot of things and keeps you in the dark on a lot of others. It’s hard to initially grasp the life experience of trying to kill yourself multiple times as a kid when you haven’t been through that.

Or the hell of growing up feeling wrong because of aspects of yourself you cannot change, or growing up having to devise elaborate mental and physical systems to keep you as safe as you can from your own family.

Dorothy has the empathy, but she is also in the dark on how bad it can get. And Amber/AG is a lot of the “how bad it can get”. Suffering childhood abuse, intense untreated conditions like PTSD, intense anxiety, and something dissociative giving her alters. It’s a lot. And it’s hard for folks to get all of that, especially when you don’t fully understand it yourself.

Like, I remember how hard it was for folks in my life to grasp all the shit that has happened to me and I’m in a point of my life where I’m relatively good about laying it all out in a coherent and dispassionate style and am open to clarifying questions.

Someone like Amber/AG who is still fighting the ghosts of her abusers and believes parts of herself to be monstrous and deserving condemnation and possibly even violence?

Panel 1: This is a huge moment literally overshadowed by everything else and Dorothy’s inability to pick it up. This may be the first time she’s told a person she isn’t dating about her condition, laying it out how it works for her head as a multiple system teetering on the edge of full dissociation.

And it’s painfully honest of her. She cares about Dorothy’s claim, that she knowingly lied to her, because she didn’t, nor did AG. This is how Amber/AG works.

And this is big because I’ve seen a million times in the comments about Amber/AG, how she is just faking being a multiple system to get out of responsibilities or ownership of actions.

And that’s a common thing thrown at people in multiple systems a lot. That we are faking it. And if we’re faking it, why must we be doing it, obviously we must be doing it to deceive or get out responsibility. So our attempts to fill in our memory gaps or reach out for support or understanding is seen as an inability to own our bad behavior, even in instances where there is no bad behavior to be pointed to or where we are careful to take collective ownership for harm.

And it fucks with you being a multiple. You get drowned in that messaging, that you are a liar, that you are dangerous and can’t be trusted, that you are just a snake trying to avoid ownership. It played a large part in my experiences suffering abuse because I’m more likely than most to accept responsibility for things that aren’t my fault and apologize for them simply because of that messaging.

And you see pieces of that here. AG didn’t lie. She told a very specific truth and she told it reluctantly. Dorothy was the one who interpreted that neurotypically and ran with it. And Amber is in a situation where the consent of her desire not to have a conversation was ignored and where she is in the context of having fulfilled her literal worst nightmare in order to save Dorothy’s life.

And yet here she is still trying to explain and letting Dorothy drive the narrative. It’s heartbreaking and so fucking real to experience and why I love so much that it’s Willis telling this story. I don’t see any other person who has not had experience with DID getting something like that, getting that singularly fucked up experience and the pressures put on multiple system folks.

That care and dedication mean a lot to me, so yeah, damn thank you Willis!

Here’s my issue about Panel 1: It comes very, very close to a “You didn’t ask” justification for a lie of omission.

I’m hardly an expert in DID, not remotely, but… Amber/AmaziGirl are aware of their condition and are reasoning and capable people/person/like-I-Said-I’m-Not-An-Expert-I’ll-Get-The-Lingo-Wrong.

If you’re asked “Did anyone in your family kill anyone”, and you say no, knowing that a cousin had killed someone, and later using the justification of “…well, my cousin’s not in my direct family” as an excuse…

This scene reads to be as A/AG knowing the question Dorothy was meaning to ask, and instead just answering the literal question posed to her. To me, that’s a lie of omission and, between friends, just as bad as a bald-faced lie.

I think that Danny has started to respond like that. At some point after he and Amazi broke up he asked Amber about her current associate with Sal, hurt that she was hanging with her after breaking up with him for being friendly with Sal. And Amber says it is Amazi, not her that likes Sal, and Danny respondsd along the l ines that it was Amazi that broke up with him, asn’t it.

I think that was Danny at least beginning to get the siutation. He didn’t argue with amber saying that she and amazi were seperate. just was cfonfused/hurt on which one was doing what.

So here’s the thing about hurt. Lots of folks feel like they can bury hurt and that hurt will stay locked into the little cage you make for it. But oftentimes that goes somewhere. If you’re like me, that hurt goes into self-abuse and self-blame, but for people who aren’t a mixture of damage and depression, that hurt usually comes out in some way at some time.

And that doesn’t need to be the source of the hurt or even directed at the person who caused the hurt. See Ruth, suffering intense abuse at her grandfather’s hand turning that into extreme reactions to common hall annoyances or Carla turning the hurt of a childhood mostly denied to her into intense arguments about a children’s show’s superiority.

And this is that moment for Dorothy and you sense that she gets it in that Panel 3 where she mumbles and almost drops off her anger. What she is angry at isn’t this. She’s angry and hurt by the intensity of what she saw and how much it fucked her up being someone unused to violence, but she knows bringing that up would be fucked up.

She’s angry and hurt about losing an idol she could look up to with rose-colored glasses. That AG isn’t some perfect being living a dream she’s not sure she’ll ever reach, but an alter of a very scared, very much in pain young woman who is struggling with stuff, stuff that might have even been made worse by Dorothy’s unabashed fangirlism and thrusting of her into the spotlight.

So she’s mad at herself for letting herself build AG that much as a perfect being and mad at the situation for how much violence Amber had to show and maybe even mad at how she largely froze up in the situation.

And here it’s coming out over something completely disconnected.

And the thing is that this is common. On the benign side, we see it with deeper couple issues like issues of cheating or disrespect blowing up in arguments about whose turn it was to wash the dishes.

On the more horrifying side, we see folks like the neo-nazis marching and committing violence because they’re feelings of inadequacies of living up to the standards of masculinity they set for themselves comes out in intense violent hatred of everyone not like them.

And it’s a very human thing to let hurt out in these ways, because as much as we want to ignore them especially when they feel “dumb”, they don’t actually go away or change that underlying issue that is actually bothering them.

Like, there is no amount of killing minorities that will address the bullshit masculinity standards and desires for a world that will never be that makes them feel justified in that bloodshed.

And in this small moment, we get the more benign, but no less hurtful. I would beat money that if Amber had actually treated the issue of telling the truth with good faith that Dorothy would have failed to really be appeased by whatever she would say. Because none of it would get at the real core of hurt that Dorothy is sharing here.

And I feel this strongly, because I’ve been in situations of being the soft recipient of that misplaced hurt. I’ve been there a lot. Where I get the nasty dump because of their anger at suffering from others (usually family members) that they can’t blow up on. Largely because I’m pretty patient about absorbing that kind of stuff and don’t fight it.

But it’s still unfair and it still hurts. Amber/AG didn’t actively seek to mislead Dorothy as some grand conspiracy to make her publish wrong things as if that mattered more than people’s lives. And it’s especially big because this all also came out in the context of Dorothy having the power to out her if she so chose.

So yeah, even if she had lied, it’d be more than justified given the intense amount of power Dorothy had over her in that moment. And her statements on agency are even more laughable given that she gave no agency to Amber to escape this conversation and has often put Amber/AG in positions with few options to try and get a scoop.

Now the important coda to all of this is that Dorothy is not a bad person. She’s a standard human with a standard human reaction to her standard human hurt. This is extremely normative. This is extremely common. This doesn’t make her a bad person.

Hurt is still hurt. And Dorothy felt hurt and translated it into a means she could feel aggrieved. That’s downright ubiquitous. And that hurt is still going to be there, no matter what until the real topic is addressed.

Panel 5: And here Amber cuts to the real source of that hurt and the real topic of conversation, which is hella brave considering how folks that are avoiding that stuff tend to react negatively to trying to center it.

And what she’s saying is extremely important and real. Being put up on a pedestal is not a good thing. Folks who do that, who hero worship you as a perfect being will be the first ones to tear you down when you fuck up or reveal how much of a broken mess you are.

The easiest example of this would be men who put specific women on a pedestal out of their “love” for them. Many times these become stalkers or harassers as these men begin to resent not being “paid back” for their obsessive love or see signs of humanity that break the internal narrative they were running in their head about them.

And this is a less dangerous version of that. Dorothy built up a whole internal mythology surrounding AG, reinforcing dangerous narratives that AG was the golden alter while Amber was the damage. And she did it for herself. To have someone aspirational to give her strength on her very long journey to meet her dreams.

And it’s not even like that inclination is a bad thing. Most of us need heroes to call upon for strength, but that’s why those heroes need to be fictional. Need to be Wonder Woman or Superman or so on and not real people, and especially not real people you are personally meeting many times through your daily life.

Because real people can’t fulfill internal narratives. Amber/AG here tried so hard to fulfill that for Dorothy and is now being blamed for “lying to her” for striving to meet that expectation. But Amber/AG is a hurting young woman going through an emotional and psychological crisis.

Should she be given a free pass for wherever she might hurt others based on that crisis? No. But it does mean she could never fulfill the idea Dorothy had in her head about who Amber/AG was.

My major problem with Amber over the last few years has been that Yeah, she has a lot of issues. Not that in specific, my problem is that she KNOWS she has issues but isn’t looking for help. She wants to do things HER way and damn whomever gets hurt along the way.

Look at Danny, he tried to be there for her. For BOTH of her. And she ultimately pushed him away for reasons she never explained to him, hell, later she started hanging out with Sal after she pushed him away for doing the same. Danny had the right to be Monstruosly Angry and Hurt and he just let it slide.

Amber is convinced that she doesn’t deserve love or support from anyone. That’s why she’s not looking for help, and why she’s been pushing everyone away lately. “Her way” of doing things basically amounts to maximizing her own suffering in the hopes of maybe relieving her misplaced feelings of guilt and shame.

She’s convinced that if she doesn’t push everyone (especially Danny) away, she’s only going to hurt them the way her father hurt her. Yes, it ends up hurting people she cares about, but Amber thinks she’s protecting them, and literally doesn’t see a better way.

It’s a self-destructive thing a lot of folks do, especially given our culture’s propensity for labeling folks with mental health conditions as being “broken” and irredeemable and akin to mass murderers.

I’m hoping it will end well in the end, but yeah, I agree, she needs professional help to try and crawl out of some of her stuff and give her better coping strategies that don’t make her conditions worse.

Panels 6-7: I have hope here. That this conversation will actually be productive and positive in the end. Yes, it’s starting bad, but Dorothy is a woman with an intense river of empathy within her and if Amber shares the reality and history she is operating under, it’s likely that Dorothy will be sympathetic and want to help her find a sense of stability with the conditions she is living with.

My only concern is that Amber believes herself to be a monster, is obsessed with that narrative. And it would be so easy for her here to try and scare off Dorothy once and for all by playing up that internal belief.

This may sound like I’m putting you on a pedestal, but I feel compelled to say that out of all your damage and trauma you have forged a spectacularly good person. I feel like I get a little closer to beginning to see a path to be a whole and decent person each time I read one of your analyses. Thank you!

Which is okay, because it’s part of being human. Everyone ends up holding the idiot ball sooner or later; like you said, it’s not healthy to expect perfection.

I was told recently by a friend that I would have to to do a *lot* more inappropriate things before they’d even *start* being bothered by it 🙂 It’s nice to have evidence that my paranoid thoughts are wrong. 🙂

I wish that was taught more, that it’s not healthy to put people on a pedestal… it’s not healthy to let people continue patterns of bad behaviour unchecked, either, but… people seem prone to jumping between those two extremes. it’s like the whole world, America especially, has gotten caught up in black&white thinking. :/ coke vs pepsi, red vs blue, good vs evil…

Here it’s politicians, lawyers, bankers, and insurance companies. Ever since Watergate a decent portion of the US population believes that a decent portion of high ranked (as in national level) journalists are honest. The problem is thatmost people here in the US choose the journalistic source that conforms most to their pre-existing beliefs, and automatically assume that the other journalistic sources are where the dishonest journalists are. It exists as part of the ever increasing privatisation of the field of journalism. Most news sources nowadays are owned by a parent company or an individual, and those news sources are required to express the views of the owner, even if they disagree. The result is that we in the US cherry pick those who “tell it like it is” aka “tell us what we want to hear”. All while the press generally becomes less free, and journalists have to either swallow their integrity to work for a company they don’t agree with that places limits on their freedom, or pick a different career. We view as honest those who have been forced to become dishonest. Thanks a lot capitalism.

I’m sorry, but when people say this shot I want to punch th3m and scream at them. Not because you’re wrong. You’re far too right, goddamnit.

But they never offer even a hope of a solution. Not even the resources to help me find a solution. If this is true, who am I supposed to turn to to hear the truth? Unfiltered, unvetted posts on Tumblr? First-person eyewitness accounts with all their misrememberings and obscurity? Independent news outlets with no budget and agendas even more blatant?

I can’t do a full on investigati9n of every little story, people. I have a sad remnant of a life to live here.

Give me something. Give all us poor schmucks drowning in lies a rope and a boat.